Gone in 90 seconds
Were my trans protestors the last gasp of campus censorship?
Last Thursday I did something utterly normal: I turned up to do a Q&A at Balliol College Philosophy Society at the invitation of a PhD student at the college. A large research university like Oxford will have hundreds, perhaps thousands such events every year, free and open to any staff member or student who’s interested in the topic, in my case my book, “Trans: Gender Identity and the New Battle for Women’s Rights”.
The event started normally, too — despite some kerfuffle outside as people who hadn’t registered and didn’t have an Oxford ID card tried to argue that nonetheless they should be allowed in. The host, PhD student John Maier, started by asking what my book was about and why it was so controversial. I’ve got the first bit down to a standard two-minute patter by now, but the second bit is always harder. The short version is “the world has gone insane.” The long version occupies several chapters and took months to research and write.
The time is ripe for students and staff to re-expand the range of opinions it’s possible to express
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And then things went weird: a couple of dozen people stood up, unfurled pink-and-blue trans flags and held up placards denouncing me in extravagant terms. My insistence that the two sexes, male and female, are objective categories and salient in a variety of legal and social situations is, apparently “the thin end of the fascist wedge”. I’m a danger to children because I argue against giving them drugs that halt their puberty and cause permanent physical and mental harm. The protesters then walked out.
I had wondered beforehand if there would be trouble. Two years ago, when I spoke at Caius College Cambridge, a large and noisy protest outside intimidated attendees and a breakaway group came into the college and banged so loudly on the doors that at times I couldn’t be heard. A week before the Balliol event some graduate students had written to the college’s master, calling on her to cancel the event.
In a statement they claimed that inviting me to speak constituted unlawful discrimination and would damage the mental health of students and staff. A long article ran in the Cherwell, a student newspaper, and there was a petition condemning me for an eclectic and not entirely accurate collection of sins. Bizarrely, one was that I have a quote from Gisèle Pelicot in my Twitter bio — “shame must change sides” — which the creator of the petition failed to recognise and somehow interpreted as something to do with trans.
Because, of course, everything has to do with trans. This must be the most narcissistic movement in history. Women’s objections to trans-identifying men in their spaces can’t possibly be because we’re thinking of our own interests; we must be doing it to hurt trans people. My objections to reality-denialism can’t be because I think it’s dangerous to deny reality, it has to be because I hate the people trying to impose their fantasies on everyone. They genuinely seem to think that they are the stars not just in their own lives but in everyone else’s.
The event in Balliol offered a tragicomic example of this self-absorption. When it was thrown open to questions from the floor, a young Irish woman stood up and explained that “presenting as a gay man” she experienced overt and vicious homophobia whenever she went out in her “flowery pants”. She had used Ireland’s system of legal gender self-ID to get her birth certificate reissued stating her sex as male, she said, and suggested that my opposition to such falsification of official documents meant I condoned the abuse she suffered.
I tried to explain the concept of discrimination and harassment “by perception”, which means that if someone thinks you’re gay — or Muslim, disabled, female or whatever — and abuses you on that basis, it’s irrelevant in law whether you actually possess the characteristic in question. But she wasn’t listening, and wouldn’t stop talking. In the end I had to take another question and ask the questioner to shout over her until she stopped.
The whole thing was unutterably ridiculous. Although she did have something of the look of an Alphabet person about her, she was unmistakably female. If I’d had to guess I would have put her down as something ambiguous and low-effort, like non-binary demiboy. But I couldn’t quite bring myself to say that to her face. Although I think it’s repulsive for a person to fantasise about experiencing a type of bigotry that causes huge suffering to a group they don’t belong to, she had clearly invested a great deal in this fantasy and built her self-image around it.
The overall message of the evening was more positive, however. I’m now hopeful that the high-water mark of campus censoriousness has been reached, and the tide has begun to turn. The time is ripe for students and staff who’d like to reclaim their right to free speech to start holding events on the sorts of things that “you’re not supposed to say”, and re-expand the range of opinions it’s possible to express.
Overall, I’d say the protest added to the jollity of the evening, and it didn’t derail things for more than about 90 seconds. And I think it’s unlikely that if tens, or hundreds, of events they object to are held they will keep up with this nonsense. Will they seriously keep going with the bother of making placards and banners, and turning out on a freezing night to wave them around? I would have thought making fools of themselves by flouncing from an event no one forced them to go to would eventually lose its charm. And if it doesn’t, who cares?
